`Why that, my dear,' returned Mrs Nickleby, `is just the point upon which I am not yet satisfied. During this sickness, she has been constantly at Madeline's bedside--never were two people so fond of each other as they have grown--and to tell you the truth, Nicholas, I have rather kept her away now and then, because I think it's a good plan, and urges a young man on. He doesn't get too sure, you know.'
She said this with such a mingling of high delight and self-congratulation, that it was inexpressibly painful to Nicholas to dash her hopes; but he felt that there was only one honourable course before him, and that he was bound to take it.
`Dear mother,' he said kindly, `don't you see that if there were really any serious inclination on the part of Mr Frank towards Kate, and we suffered ourselves for a moment to encourage it, we should be acting a most dishonourable and ungrateful part? I ask you if you don't see it, but I need not say that I know you don't, or you would have been more strictly on your guard.
Let me explain my meaning to you. Remember how poor we are.'
Mrs Nickleby shook her head, and said, through her tears, that poverty was not a crime.
`No,' said Nicholas, `and for that reason poverty should engender an honest pride, that it may not lead and tempt us to unworthy actions, and that we may preserve the self-respect which a hewer of wood and drawer of water may maintain--and does better in maintaining than a monarch in preserving his. Think what we owe to these two brothers: remember what they have done, and what they do every day for us with a generosity and delicacy for which the devotion of our whole lives would be a most imperfect and inadequate return. What kind of return would that be which would be comprised in our permitting their nephew, their only relative, whom they regard as a son, and for whom it would be mere childishness to suppose they have not formed plans suitably adapted to the education he has had, and the fortune he will inherit--in our permitting him to marry a portionless girl: so closely connected with us, that the irresistible inference must be, that he was entrapped by a plot; that it was a deliberate scheme, and a speculation amongst us three? Bring the matter clearly before yourself, mother. Now, how would you feel, if they were married, and the brothers, coming here on one of those kind errands which bring them here so often, you had to break out to them the truth? Would you be at ease, and feel that you had played an open part?'
Poor Mrs Nickleby, crying more and more, murmured that of course Mr Frank would ask the consent of his uncles first.
`Why, to be sure, that would place him in a better situation with them,' said Nicholas, `but we should still be open to the same suspicions;the distance between us would still be as great; the advantages to be gained would still be as manifest as now. We may be reckoning without our host in all this,' he added more cheerfully, `and I trust, and almost believe we are. If it be otherwise, I have that confidence in Kate that I know she will feel as I do--and in you, dear mother, to be assured that after a little consideration you will do the same.'